The world of legal technology is rapidly advancing and staying on the cutting edge can be a difference-maker for a firm, be it a one-person shop or a corporate practice. New tech tools can be used for everything from running your office to finding a notary. But two of the most impressive legal tech tools on the market go right to the heart of the lawyer’s existence—researching a case and winning it.
Lexis & Westlaw have long been industry staples when it comes time for case law research. But there’s a new player in town. Casetext is aggressively moving into the market, drastically undercutting Lexis/Westlaw on price and priding itself on the efficient delivery of information.
Casetext has an attractive user-friendly interface that allows attorneys to just drag-and-drop a brief from their personal desktop computer or tablet and plug it into Casetext. The relevant case law to your brief then appears on your screen in front of you, with a variety of filters to help further narrow it down.
This platform is the result of litigators becoming frustrated by what they saw as inefficiencies—both cost and time spent—in the conventional product. Litigation experts teamed up with AI engineers to create Casetext and potentially upend the market.
A related platform is Ravel Law. This app is an analytical tool designed to help predict how a judge might rule on your case, and how you can help influence that decision. The algorithm is designed to pull up similar cases and present them in an easy-to-understand visual format that will give a lawyer a sense of whether this is a case worth trying. Personal injury lawyers, whose bottom lines are made and broken by these judgments, will find it particularly valuable.
Ravel Law even goes one step further and shows the personal peccadilloes of individual judges. One lawyer learned that the judge in his case didn’t take to sports analogies and immediately dropped the phrase “moving the goal post” from his argument.
The need for a competitive edge gets more imperative with each passing year. Casetext and Ravel Law are two new legal tech tools aiming to do exactly that.
